Start reprinting those textbooks! Pluto is no longer a planet.
Start reprinting those textbooks! Pluto is no longer a planet.
Well, I saw Snakes on a Plane yesterday. It was a solid B-movie—a combination of Speed, Anaconda and Passenger 57, and probably more fun than all three combined. Was it worth all that ironic Internet hype? Not really, and its box office showing (a modest $14 million) reflects that.
Snakes‘s mediocre box office take is yet another example of just how small and unrepresentative of the real world the blogosophere is. Clearly, the Internet community does not give the slightest indication of the situation on the ground. People with the time, money and inclination to write or read a blog or discuss topics at length online do not represent a very good cross-section of America.
That said, I think the execs who produced Snakes knew that they had a second-tier flick on their hands and that going along with the hype couldn’t hurt. In the end, it probably netted them an extra $1.4 million in preview night tickets. Of course, for the Snakes fans the film was always secondary, and I suspect it will sink very quickly.
But the filmmakers did do about as much as they could with the concept. You get to see snakes biting every conceivable body part (yes, every one). You get a gratuitous Mile High Club scene. You get Samuel L. Jackson swearing and generally being Samuel L. Jackson. And you’ll happily forget all about the film ten minutes after leaving the theater.
DG suckered me into watching Rock Star: INXS last year. In my defense, it was interesting to see a show on prime time where live rock was played on a weekly basis; plus, they used a lot of music from the era during which my music tastes ossified (1991-95). But while the show was interesting, I wasn’t much interested in the outcome because I wasn’t an INXS fan.
This season seemed a little more interesting; rather than an established band with an established sound, they were creating a new band with Tommy Lee of Motley Crue, Jason Newstead (formerly of Metallica), and Gilby Clarke (apparently formerly of Guns ‘N Roses). I found this a bit more interesting since there was at least some possibility I might be interested in listening to this band’s CD.
Initially, the only contestant that interested me was Dilana. I picked her to win very early on. I remember the blondes—Jill, Jenny and Storm—blurred together originally. I was all about Dilana.
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Like most people, I use the same restroom at work every day. It becomes a refuge where you are safe from the demands of middle management, or that guy in the cube next to you who’s been talking loudly to his realtor for the last hour and yet your supervisor doesn’t seem to notice, but let you try and make one personal call and—
But I digress. Getting back to the point, you tend to get pretty familiar with that restroom. Sometimes you get so familiar with it, you can actually track the appearance of new graffiti.
There’s a graffito (that’s the singular of “graffiti,” apparently) in my restroom that I’ve watched grow over the last couple of weeks. It’s an interesting process. Stephen King has already written a short story about restroom graffiti—I can’t remember the title off the top of my head—so rather than fictionalize it, I thought I’d chronicle its epic story (because I know that you, dear reader, would like nothing better than to read a lengthy account of restroom vandalism).
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I finally got around to reading McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories last week. I’d read the first volume, McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasure of Thrilling Tales. Both books begin with a well-written defense of genre fiction by Michael Chabon (of Kavalier & Clay fame). Chabon argues that the “revelatory short story” and literary fiction as a whole constitute a genre as much as science fiction, fantasy, or horror. The essays are well-argued and both enjoyable and satisfying to read.
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Newsarama managed to ask Bryan Singer the $10K question: since Clark erased Lois’s memory of sleeping together in Superman II, does she not know how she got pregnant? Here’s Singer’s response:
NRAMA: After he gave up his powers in Superman II, Lois and Superman slept together. I’m going to assume that that’s when he got her pregnant…
BS: Possibly.
NRAMA: Then he gives her the kiss, which made her forget that they even slept together. Was the pregnancy a mystery for her?
BS: I ignored that part. I just assumed she remembered sleeping with him.
So there you go. Just ignore that part! But wait—does that mean Lois knows Clark is Superman? I guess you should ignore that too.
The rest of the interview is primarily Singer stating his opinion that poor marketing is the reason for Superman Returns‘s relatively unimpressive box office numbers.
On the subject of Hellboy, I picked up the adorable new Hellboy Qee figures this week. There’s one of Hellboy (with a wee pistol) and his aquatic pal Abe Sapien. Very cute. They come with optional keychains, but I’ve just got mine standing on my desk at work.
Even the most casual reader of this blog probably knows I’m a big fan of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. The comic is one of the best out there, and the film, directed by Guillermo Del Toro, is my favorite comic book film.
So it was with great pleasure that I read that Hellboy 2, whose future had been in doubt after Revolution Studios announced it would be closing its doors in October 2007, has been picked up by Universal Studios—the company that passed on the first film years ago.
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